and after many seconds expel it again. Six or eight times he did this,
then turned back into the lamplight.

"It will sound to you quite mad, I expect," he said, "but if you want to
hear the soberest truth I have ever spoken and shall ever speak, I will
tell you about myself. But come into the garden if it is not too damp
for you. I have never told any one yet, but I shall like to tell you. It
is long, in fact, since I have even tried to classify what I have
learned."

They wandered into the fragrant dimness of the pergola, and sat down.
Then Frank began:

"Years ago, do you remember," he said, "we used often to talk about the
decay of joy in the world. Many impulses, we settled, had contributed to
this decay, some of which were good in themselves, others that were
quite completely bad. Among the good things, I put what we may call
certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with
suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers. But out of those things
spring very bad ones, useless renunciations, asceticism for its own
sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no
corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which
devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of
spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, the brutes
held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil: it was a
doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the commonest crime
one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the matter.

"Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that
joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned